BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — Saddam Hussein told judges Wednesday that he ordered the trials of Shiites who eventually were executed in the 1980s and said their lands should be confiscated, but he insisted that those actions were not criminal.

The former Iraqi leader also said his co-defendants should be freed, and he alone should be tried for the crackdown in southern Dujail after a 1982 assassination attempt on Saddam. He said the men simply were following orders.

"Where is the crime?" Saddam asked the court. "Is referring a defendant who opened fire at a head of state, no matter what his name is, a crime?

"If there is a law issued by Revolutionary Command Council that calls for confiscating land, then try the chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. He is present," said Saddam, who was the head of the council, a main institution of his regime.

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Chief judge Raouf Abdel-Rahman was about to adjourn the session when Saddam asked to speak. After 15 minutes, the judge adjourned the session until March 12.

For a second day, the chief prosecutor projected documents on an overhead screen outlining the bureaucracy behind a crackdown that led to the imprisonment of nearly 400 people, including women and children as young as 3 months old, and the executions of 148 people following a 1982 attempt on Saddam's life in the town of Dujail.

On Tuesday, prosecutors presented a presidential decree with a signature it said was Saddam's approving death sentences against the 148 _ the most direct evidence yet against him.

Saddam and his seven co-defendants are on trial for torture, illegal imprisonments and executions in the crackdown, and they could be hanged if convicted.

Saddam's co-defendants tried Wednesday to dispute new documents, including letters by informants pointing out families for arrest. The former Iraqi leader also defended the men, saying that "leaving aside the issue of whether these documents were forged," they were simply notifying authorities.

"This was an informing operation, like any policeman when he tells something to his station or any citizen who sees or hears (a crime)," Saddam argued. "To say that those people were sentenced to death because Abdullah wrote or it was said that he wrote it, this is rubbish."

Prosecutors also played an audiotape of Saddam, trying to implicate him in another charge _ the destruction of palm groves owned by the Dujail families.

In the tape, Saddam talks with an official from his Baath Party about destroying groves around the southern city of Basra following the 1991 suppressed uprising by Shiites after the Gulf War.

The official, Abdul-Ghani Abdel-Ghafour, tells Saddam he modeled the razing in Basra on "your guidelines in ... Dujail."

Saddam said the objective in Dujail was to prevent the extensive groves from being a hiding place for the opposition.

"Because the groves were cut down, the groves will not be a refuge anymore," Saddam was heard saying on the tape.

The trial, which began Oct. 19, appears to have entered a new, more orderly phase after chief judge Raouf Abdel-Rahman imposed control.

In contrast to the outbursts, insults and arguments that characterized past proceedings, the defendants listened silently as the documents were shown. When they wanted to make a point, they raised their hands, and Abdel-Rahman often told them to wait, then let them speak later.

Saddam's defense team attended the trial for a second straight day after ending a boycott started when Abdel-Rahman rejected their demand to step down.

The turn in the case boosted hopes the controversial trial will be seen as credible in a country still sharply divided by Saddam's legacy.

But those splits have only gotten wider amid a surge of bloody sectarian violence between Iraq's Sunnis and Shiites. At least 68 people were killed Tuesday in bombings and mortar barrages, mainly against religious targets, in continued violence sparked by last week's attack on a major Shiite shrine.

In the first months of the trial, a series of Dujail residents testified that they were imprisoned and tortured and that their relatives were killed. Several women related how they were stripped naked, beaten or given electric shocks _ one testifying that Ibrahim himself kicked her in the chest as she hung upside down.

The prosecution documents aim to establish a paper trail linking the defendants to the crackdown.

On Wednesday, chief prosecutor Jaafar al-Moussawi showed handwritten letters said to be from three defendants sent to the Interior Ministry in the days after the July 8, 1982, assassination attempt on Saddam, informing on Dujail families linked to the Dawa Party, a Shiite opposition militia accused in the attack.

More than 10 of the names in the letters eventually appeared on the list of those sentenced to death in 1984 by the regime's Revolutionary Court, and al-Moussawi said the three men, therefore, had a direct role in their deaths.

"May my hand be cut off if I gave information against anyone," said defendant Ali Dayih, who allegedly wrote one of the letters. "I had no political responsibility. ... It's all a frame-up."

Two other defendants _ Abdullah Kazim Ruwayyid and his son, Mizhar _ also stood and denied the letters were theirs. The three men allegedly were local Dujail officials from Saddam's Baath Party.

"The handwriting is not mine. The signature is not mine," Mizhar Ruwayyid said.

He insisted his only job in Dujail was as a telephone operator and the vocabulary used in the letter showed it was not written by him.

"I only finished elementary school and the document presented was written by someone with a bachelor's degree," he said.

The prosecution appeared intent on showing the depth of record keeping that bureaucrats in the intelligence and security agencies kept at the time _ down to how 399 detained men, women and children from Dujail were transported in 1984 from a Baghdad prison to a desert prison in southern Iraq.

For each vehicle that carried the prisoners, a list was made at the time, with the names of the drivers and the prisoners on board. Al-Moussawi presented more than a dozen such handwritten lists.

The lists included a 3-month-old girl named Suad Jassim and entire families, including women and their preteen children.

The documents Wednesday concentrated on the lower-tier defendants in the trial. On Tuesday, the prosecution aimed to show the role of the top defendants: Saddam and his half brother Barzan Ibrahim, the head of the Mukhabarat intelligence agency at the time of the Dujail crackdown.

Chief among the documents shown Tuesday was a June 16, 1984, presidential decree approving death sentences against 148 Shiites from Dujail. The document had a signature that al-Moussawi said was Saddam's.

The sentences were passed after an "imaginary trial," al-Moussawi told the court.

"None of the defendants were brought to court. Their statements were never recorded," he said.

Other documents showed that about 50 of those sentenced died during interrogation before they could go to the gallows. One man, his brother and two sons were executed by mistake, and Saddam allegedly ordered them declared "martyrs" to cover up the error.

When it was discovered that an 11-year-old and nine other juveniles who were on the list to be executed were still in prison years later, they were ordered killed and their bodies buried in secret in 1989 — an order approved with a signature the prosecution said was Ibrahim's.